``Yeah, I was a hippie, fer sure! My hair was, like, down to here. I had a really long beard, man, and all my clothes were tie-dyed. I smoked the most righteous hookah on the Hog Farm. I was backstage at Woodstock. The Maharishi gave me his unlisted number ...``

Because the heyday of hippiedom occurred two decades ago and because the last years of this decade have been marked by enervating, hippie-related ``20th anniversaries,`` young people might find themselves easily gulled by those pathetically developmentally-arrested adults who go around claiming status as lapsed flower children.

Now that we are safely past the recent 20th anniversary celebrations of the Woodstock Festival of Mud and Hubris (not its real name; see below) and this year`s Neo-Summer of Love is, thankfully, at an end, it`s time to rip the hairy masks off the evil cynics purporting to have been hippies in their otherwise long-since-forgotten youth.

Such pretenders usually reveal themselves when somebody presses them to discuss subtle details of the alternate lifestyle. They might claim, for example, that Tom Hayden was a ``heavy dude.`` Feel free to snicker cruelly: Hayden never ``offed`` a single ``pig.``

Then ask the putative ex-hippie to name the freakiest head in the movie Easy Rider. Authentic insiders understand that Jack Nicholson was by far the hippest character in that flick -- not the wheezy Dennis Hopper and certainly not the polyesterish Pete Fonda. Back then, most truly blissed-out people had their smiles attached to their eyebrows; that`s why so many of them grew bushy sideburns.

If none of the above seems to work and you still believe the subject actually was a burr-cut member of the Young Americans for Freedom, we suggest you use our hippie quiz. Anyone who truly did belong to the Age of Aquarius should know a majority of the answers. Frauds tend to slink away muttering, ``What a bummer.``

THE QUIZ

1. Who was the first primary manufacturer of hallucinogens in the United States?

2. In which nightclub did the Jefferson Airplane initially take flight?

3. What was the original name of the Grateful Dead?

4. Who wrote Revolution for the Hell of It and what pen name did he use?

5. Which label in what city produced Janis Joplin`s first record?

6. What was the real name of the Beatles` White Album?

7. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair actually took place near what town?

8. Identify the local prosecutor who led the May 1966, raid on Timothy Leary`s Millbrook, N.Y., commune.

9. Novelist Ken Kesey formed the quintessential hippie collective. What did he call it?

10. Who were the original members of the Grateful Dead?

11. What was the code name of the Holiday Inn that housed Woodstock performers?

12. Who were the primary anarchist-social workers active in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love?

13. Who penned the line, ``Today is the first day of the rest of your life``?

14. What group of individuals introduced the term ``hippie``?

15. Name the author of this sentence: ``I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on national TV.``

THE ANSWERS:

1. Augustus Owsley Stanley III

2. The Matrix of Fillmore Street, San Francisco

3. The Warlocks

4. Abbie Hoffman, writing as ``Free``

5. Mainstream Records, Chicago

6. The Beatles

7. Bethel, N.Y.

8. G. Gordon Liddy

9. The Merry Pranksters

10. Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Pigpen

11. Tranquility Base

12. The Diggers, named for a group of 17th century English free spirits

13. Beat poet Gregory Corso

14. The beats, or ``beatniks,`` who in the `50s used hippie as a derogatory label, meaning ``half hip``